Eleatic School

Eleatic School, a school of Greek philosophy which took its name from the town Elea, in Magna Gruecia - the Greek settlement in Southern Italy - of which place the three chief Eleatic philosophers - Parmenides, Zeno, and Leucippus, were natives. The school was founded, according to tradition, by Xenophanes, who came to Elea from Greece. Their method was synthetic as opposed to the analytic Ionian system. Instead of searching for a unity of principle in the varying phenomena of life, the Eleatics started with the idea that the one or absolute alone is real, and in their later development denied that existence can be truly predicated of variety.